Vodafone Launches German Hosting, Cloud Services to Grow Revenue in Key European Market

Telecommunications company Vodafone Group launched a new ‘Made in Germany’ cloud and hosting service this week, targeting customers in the Frankfurt metropolitan area who want to keep their data stored close to home, according to a report by Telecompaper.

While Vodafone is known primarily for its wireless business, the company is looking at ways to expand “more and more outside mobile” by going into web hosting, security, and entertainment, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in a presentation at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, this week.

Localized hosting and cloud services has always been important in Europe, and Germany in particular, but it has grown as concerns around international government snooping have escalated. Germany in particular is one of Europe’s largest proponents for storing data locally, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has even gone so far as proposing a separate European communications network that would keep data within the EU, disabling it from passing through US-based servers.

Vodafone has to make up some ground in Germany after seeing its revenue start to slip, which is problematic considering the German market accounts for nearly one-fifth of sales, according to Bloomberg. To that end, Vodafone is betting its $10.4 billion purchase of Kabel Deutschland will help boost revenue in Germany.

Currently, Deutsche Telekom is the top mobile operator in Germany, with Vodafone in second place. Last week Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership with CipherCloud to provide encrypted cloud services to enterprises in Germany.